Blues

by John Hersey

  S: Why couldn’t we have kept the second fish we caught and put it in the freezer?

  F: We could. But when we ate it, it wouldn’t have tasted anywhere nearly as good as this fresh-caught one. Bluefish is savory but it doesn’t keep well. It should be eaten within one or two days of capture, or, far better, within two or three hours….By the way, show Barbara how big the one was that we threw back.

  S: This big.

  F: Hm. One problem about bringing fish in to freeze them is that they may shrink on the way ashore.

  THE FISH

  by Elizabeth Bishop

  I caught a tremendous fish

  and held him beside the boat

  half out of water, with my hook

  fast in a corner of his mouth.

  He didn’t fight.

  He hadn’t fought at all.

  He hung a grunting weight,

  battered and venerable

  and homely. Here and there

  his brown skin hung in strips

  like ancient wallpaper,

  and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper:

  shapes like full-blown roses

  stained and lost through age.

  He was speckled with barnacles,

  fine rosettes of lime,

  and infested

  with tiny white sea-lice,

  and underneath two or three

  rags of green weed hung down.

  While his gills were breathing in

  the terrible oxygen

  —the frightening gills,

  fresh and crisp with blood,

  that can cut so badly—

  I thought of the coarse white flesh

  packed in like feathers,

  the big bones and the little bones,

  the dramatic reds and blacks

  of his shiny entrails,

  and the pink swim-bladder

  like a big peony.

  I looked into his eyes

  which were far larger than mine

  but shallower, and yellowed,

  the irises backed and packed

  with tarnished tinfoil

  seen through the lenses

  of old scratched isinglass.

  They shifted a little, but not

  to return my stare.

  —It was more like the tipping

  of an object toward the light.

  I admired his sullen face,

  the mechanism of his jaw,

  and then I saw

  that from his lower lip

  —if you could call it a lip—

  grim, wet, and weaponlike,

  hung five old pieces of fish-line,

  or four and a wire leader

  with the swivel still attached,

  with all their five big hooks

  grown firmly in his mouth.

  A green line, frayed at the end

  where he broke it, two heavier lines,

  and a fine black thread

  still crimped from the strain and snap

  when it broke and he got away.

  Like medals with their ribbons

  frayed and wavering,

  a five-haired beard of wisdom

  trailing from his aching jaw.

  I stared and stared and victory filled up

  the little rented boat,

  from the pool of the bilge

  where oil had spread a rainbow

  around the rusted engine

  to the bailer rusted orange,

  the sun-cracked thwarts,

  the oarlocks on their strings,

  the gunnels—until everything

  was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

  And I let the fish go.

  June 24

  FISHERMAN: On a day like this, with no wind and such a calm sea, I’m taking you out at dead low tide, slack water. When the current begins to run this afternoon there won’t be any rip on Middle Ground, just a kind of boiling up, like that in a sluggish river with a rough bottom; you need a breeze for a rip. So we’ll cast for the fish in deeper water alongside the West Chop end of the shoal. The first hour of the flood tide is a good time for blues.

  STRANGER: It goes without saying that I’ve never tried casting.

  F: I’ll show you how. We’ll have a little practice.

  S: What a day! Every day is different from all the other days out here, isn’t it?

  F: Every minute is different—has a different light—from every other. It’s as if every minute were a sequin on a dress on a walking woman.

  S: Even without the fishing—

  F: Now, now! We’re out to get our supper. With this clear sky, it’s a bit bright today. The fish will be lying deep in the water, waiting to dine at dusk, and a little choosy. Hard to tempt. We’ll see. We’ll use this metal jig; I’ll put a small flag of pork rind on the hook. All right, here you go.

  [Instructions on casting, off West Chop.]

  F: There, that’s better. Remember, snap it, like a fly swatter. Don’t forget to let the jig sink for several seconds when it hits the water; the fish are deep. Fire away.

  S [casting]: I can’t get over how beautiful it all is. This iridescent surface. I see the greenish tint you were talking about that first day.

  F: Yes, the meadows of plankton. May I tell you about one of the most exciting days of my life?

  S: How big was the fish you caught that day? Was it so big that it almost pulled you overboard?

  F: The day I’m speaking of had nothing to do—directly—with blues. Indirectly, yes. Ah! I’m afraid your asking me those questions, with a little edge I think I heard on your voice, means that you didn’t like my teasing you about the size of the fish we threw back last time. I apologize.

  S: Thank you, there’s no need. I just thought that in case you were going to tell me a fish story, I should hold you to a landsman’s standard of truth.

  F: But you’re getting to be a fisherman, sir! You must remember that there’s plenty of salt in the sea to take with the tales your fellow fishermen tell.

  The day I’m thinking about was very much like this one—a dazzling high sky and not a breath of air. A watered-silk sea. The Elizabeths, Woods Hole, Falmouth, you could almost touch them, the air was so clear. I took Spray to the Middle Ground hole right opposite Leroy Goff’s house—that squarish shingled house standing alone near the water off there—

  S: I see the one you mean.

  F: That’s the hole where I’ve caught more blues than anywhere else on the shoal. Right there, that day, I lowered over the side a plankton tow-net that I’d borrowed from a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It was a small one—a conical net about four feet long, of very fine mesh with a plastic cod end screwed onto the tip of the cone, a receptacle about the shape and size of a two-pint ice cream container. I let the net out something like fifty yards and towed it for just five minutes back and forth over the productive hole as slowly as Spray could idle, so the water would run through the mesh and not just pile up at the mouth of the net. Then I hauled it in and held it upright and gave it a good shaking, to make sure that as much as possible of what it had caught would go down into the cod end. I detached the cod end and emptied its contents into my bucket and diluted it with about half a pailful of seawater.

  I skimmed over the flat Sound to Woods Hole, tied up at the Marine Biological Laboratory dock, and carried the bucket to my biologist friend’s lab in the basement of Redfield, on Main Street not far from the ferry dock. My friend set me up with two microscopes, one with a range up to × 40, the other more powerful, × 160, and gave me some pipettes and a thick slide with a series of small bowl-like
hollows in it, and soon, when I had deposited just one tiny dollop of my treasure in one of the hollows and had brought it into focus on the smaller scope, I was suddenly lost in a new world—a new ocean—that made my heart pound.

  The sea had come to life. Here truly were things creeping innumerable, both great and small beasts. “Such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not at hand.” The creatures danced in the water like many motes of fine dust drifting in a ray of sunshine in a room that has just been swept. All of them were actually or nearly microscopic, of course, but some seemed large and menacing, others tiny, passive. I saw under my eyes the subtlety of the Greek word πλαγκτον, plankton, which properly takes several English words to translate: “that which is made to wander.” There were both plants and animals, as if in a crowded jungle. Many of them—even some of the plants—could propel themselves in one way or another, and this gave me a sense of how massive, how powerful, the currents of the sea must be, if so many of these fast swimmers are carried helplessly about in them, as wanderers.

  Soon, as if unexpectedly seeing the faces of friends in a rush-hour Lexington Avenue subway car, I recognized in this pulsating little drip of the ocean some individuals I’d read about, seen pictures of. Their forms were as various, it seemed, as the patterns of snowflakes. Here was a diatom, a unicellular plant, its brown-green chloroplast encased in a cylindrical box of silica, with a top fitting over a bottom, exactly like a tiny glass pillbox or jewel case. Other diatoms were like chains of opals, hairy caterpillars, glass rods, pods of seeds, slices of kiwi, ribbons of eggs of the channeled whelk. Here was a Ceratium tripos, a mobile anchor-shaped single-celled plant with a little whip to act as a propellor. Here was another barely visible flagellate—whipper—which was, believe it or not, both animal and plant, and which was only about two microns in length: two-millionths of a meter. Here was one of those radiolaria I was talking about the day we met, a cell with an array of fine glass spikes sticking out in all directions. Here was a fish egg, a perfect transparent sphere with a tiny spot from which a life might soon explode. Here, too, in fact, was an astonishing miniature fish, just postlarval. Here were various copepods, “oar-footed ones,” strange little insect-like crustaceans with pairs of wide-sweeping antennae. Among them was Labidocera aestiva, which my biologist friend was studying. It lays two kinds of eggs, one sort in summer and fall, which hatches quickly, and another, also in the autumn, which falls to the bottom and weathers the winter and is triggered to hatch by the warming of the water the next spring; my friend wanted to unlock the mystery of the clock in the latter. Here is Acartia hudsonica, a far smaller copepod than that other, like a miniature cockroach. A Podon polyphemoides, a transparent shrimplike beast. The active nauplius, or early larval, stage of a barnacle, a hairy little blob darting here and there. A transparent young arrowworm, like a miniature version of the pipette I’d used. A weird larva of a mollusc called a veliger, a busy lump with small wings fringed with tiny hairs, looking like river-boat sidewheels, flapping its way around like mad. Suddenly it was approached by a hungry-looking arrowworm, and it at once folded its wings and wrapped itself up into a little rock that fell away from the threat. As a British marine taxonomist, approximately a poet, named Walter Garstang, has put it:

  The Veliger’s a lively tar, the liveliest afloat,

  A whirling wheel on either side propels his little boat;

  But when the danger signal warns his bustling submarine,

  He stops the engine, shuts the port, and drops below unseen.

  After that encounter I began to be aware that all sorts of crimes were being perpetrated in this driblet of liquid. The muggers were mugging; the killers were killing; the thieves were stealing. A see-through podon was thrashing to free itself from the tentacles of a medusa, a minuscule jellyfish. It came to me that there were two ways of looking at what was happening in that crowded sea in the bowl in the slide: You could see violence, desperate struggles to survive, the will to live, the drive to perpetuate the species. You could also see, though, food chains operating, nature’s serene determination to keep in balance all the forms of life.

  S: That must have been quite an experience.

  F: It was a day of days. But forgive me: I got carried away. You’ve been whipping the sea—no luck here. Let’s move up to the hole off Leroy Goff’s house and see if we can get some action.

  S: A lot of my casts seem to plop into the water right beside the boat.

  F: You’re casting pretty well. Try to release the line with your forefinger a hair sooner; you’ll eliminate those flubs and get more distance altogether….All right, here we are. [Spoken over the side:] Now is the time for all good fish to come to the aid of my friend—do you hear me, bluefish?

  S: Does talking to the fish help?

  F: My granddaughter, Sierra, wasn’t having any luck one day. I told her to try spitting over the side. She did—and bang! We had one.

  S: What you just told me, about the day in the lab, makes me look at the water in a new way.

  F: Yes, it’s alive. At this time of year you’d probably catch a million living creatures in a cupful of this Sound water. Listen: The plants under the surface of a square mile of the sea may well exceed the amount of vegetation in a square mile of rain forest. And it’s thought that there are more copepods in the oceans than all the other animals in the world—of all kinds—put together.

  S: I had no idea there was such an abundance of life in the sea.

  F: Think of the white cliffs of Dover, how tall they are: They consist of the shell castings and skeletons of countless trillions of plankton animals deposited on a sea floor aeons ago. And, you know, some of those crustaceans I looked at under the microscope at Woods Hole had tiny droplets of oil in them. All the petroleum under the earth is thought to be derived from the sedimentation of unimaginable numbers of plankton on seabeds hundreds of millions of years ago—apparently made into mineral oil as a product of heat and pressure on those deep layers of fossils. So we drive our cars with energy given us by plankton. And of course the animals among the plankton on those ancient seabeds had derived their energy from eating vegetable plankton. All gasoline is grass.

  S: You keep talking about food chains. To a landlubber like me, that phrase suggests the A & P, or perhaps McDonald’s. Exactly what do you mean?

  F: Let’s take ourselves, to begin with. We eat chicken, we certainly eat bluefish, and we eat vegetables and other things—all sorts of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that have been built up in the bodies of animals and in plants. The bluefish that we eat is in turn a carnivore. It gets nourishment mostly from other fish. Three of the main baits of blues—herring, menhaden, and silversides—are carnivorous, too, yet they live not on other fish but on animal plankton: marine protozoa, crustaceans, the larvae of crabs and sea worms and other small zooplankton of the sorts I saw under the microscope. Those plankton animals in turn are peaceable grazers, who live on diatoms and those little things with whips—the plants.

  The reason all feeding in the sea (as on land, too) has to start with the eating of plants is that only they have the capacity to synthesize life from natural ingredients. They take the riches of the sea—various minerals and salts that have washed down from the land, among them the phosphates and nitrates of fertilizers, and organic substances like thiamine, B-12, folic acid, amino acids—and with their amazing gift of photosynthesis, using the energy of sunlight, they create new plant life. That new life has all the nutrients and vitamins that animals need, as they convert them to flesh, for reuse over and over again up the chain.

  S: Speaking of baits, the blues don’t seem much attracted by this jig we’re using.

  F: Give them time. Patience is the fisherman’s primary virtue, though he often pollutes it with swearwords. Is your arm sore?

  S: No, no. I love this.

  F: You’re getting some beauti
ful casts now.

  S: It’s like serving in tennis. I’m trying for aces.

  F: It was right here, where we are now, that I towed the plankton net that day. I was towing with the net not far below the surface, because that’s where most of the plant plankton, and therefore most of those who devour them, stay. The plants depend on light for their chlorophyll to do its work. Fifteen feet down, the intensity of light is only half what it is just under the surface. Naturally you’ll have the highest concentration of fish where you have the most plant plankton. The richest fields of vegetable plankton off our coasts, and probably on earth, are out on Georges Bank. That’s why in the days of sailing so many Maine and Massachusetts men risked their lives, even in bitter winter winds, and were so often capsized and drowned, going out for the fish feasting in the great banquet there.

  Not all the wanderers, of course, are tiny. There are Portuguese men-of-war and jellyfish—

  S: I’ve never been stung by a jellyfish, but the very idea of those tentacles gives me the shivers.

  F: Yes—so beautiful and so menacing. Marianne Moore wrote a little poem about what happens if you swim near a jellyfish:

  Visible, invisible,

  a fluctuating charm

  an amber-tinctured amethyst

  inhabits it, your arm

  approaches and it opens

  and it closes; you had meant

  to catch it and it quivers;

  you abandon your intent.

  S: Yes, I should think you would.

  F: I’ve talked about marvels out here. Here’s one for you: the stinging cell of the kind embedded by the hundreds in the tentacle of a jellyfish. It’s really almost unbelievable that such a tricky device could grow in a single cell. It has a mouth, beside which is a tiny hair, the trigger of the cell’s explosive weapon. The latter consists of a kind of bladder, like a rubber syringe, filled with a poisonous fluid, running back from the mouth, with a pair of blades folded like scissors near the mouth and a long, flexible needle coiled inside. When the hair trigger comes into contact with anything edible, there is a sudden increase of pressure inside the bulb, and out from the mouth first pop the scissors, opening out to cut an incision in the victim’s skin, then the long needle uncoils and shoots itself through it into the victim. When the needle is fully extended and rigid, its tip bursts and the bladder shoots a paralyzing drug into the victim. It’s a hypodermic needle and its barrel, all built into a single cell.